Jonathan Baldock: Touch Wood

Jonathan Baldock’s distinctive sculptural installations are immersive environments where colour, texture, scent, sound and humour combine with storytelling and enigmatic characters. Their sensory appeal is underpinned by an unsettling quality, like entering an unknown ritual. Myth, folklore and paganism, with their shapeshifting and fluid creatures, are central to the artist’s work, which offers space to reimagine queer and working people’s histories, explore hidden narratives and create alternative realities.

For YSP’s Weston Gallery, Baldock has created a completely new body of work, embracing textile sculpture and hangings, ceramic sculpture, and an evocative soundscape, created by musician Luke Barton, that unites the show’s themes through song and sampled audio. The artist’s overarching imagery for the exhibition has its origins in the fifteenth-century misericords and carved wooden figures from the quire of nearby Wakefield Cathedral. 

For his exhibition at YSP, Baldock riffs off these characters, with large-scale textile sculptures including a phoenix, a Green Man, and a humorous ‘tumbler’ who bends at the waist to look backwards through his legs whilst exposing his buttocks, embodying the bawdy imagery that was common in medieval times, even within churches. These 500-year-old sculptures inspire Baldock on several levels. As an artist, he enjoys the idea that their makers found pockets of joy in expressing themselves freely outside of the rules. As someone from a working-class background, he connects to the non-authoritarian voice of the craftsperson. As a queer person, he sees the misericords as objects that have survived the repressive ideals of history – they are subversive outsiders hiding in plain sight. Baldock’s own versions will introduce colour, texture, and embellishments through folk motifs. They  invite touch and one can even be sat upon, mirroring the misericords’ function, whilst also transforming them and allowing them to exist on a large scale, bringing them proudly out into the open. The relationship between concealment and visibility is one that resonates with the lives of many LGBTQIA+ people – to pass underneath the heteronormative radar, secrecy can at times equate to safety.